Walter Benjamin distinguished between stories and novels on the basis not of length or subject or style but of a projected relation to experience. The novel, even if read aloud, is centred on the solitude of the book, offers rich pictures of the “profound perplexity of living”. The novelist is “uncounseled, and cannot counsel others”. The storyteller, even if working in print, remembers and recreates a world of spoken connections, and “has counsel” for his or her readers. Benjamin notes—he is writing in 1936—that the idea of having counsel has “an old-fashioned ring”, but makes clear that counsel is not a separable moral or a lesson: “counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding”. To seek counsel we have to be able to tell a story. To receive counsel is to know how to act on it, but not necessarily to have a formula in which we could summarize it.

With the return of narrative to novels—the High Modernists were deeply disapproving of plot and story-telling—Benjamin's distinction begins to look shaky, but holds, I think, if we follow its argument and shift its location. There could be counsel and lack of counsel in both stories and novels; the distinction would now identify modes of writing rather than traditional labels. This English edition of the Collected Stories of Gabriel García Márquez, that story-telling novelist, invites just such questions, since it shows the author testing various kinds of counsel, none of them much like those in effect in his longer works.

The stories in this volume have all appeared in English before, but not in sequence. They correspond to three volumes in Spanish—Ojos de Perro Azul, 1955, Los Funerales de la Mamá Grande, 1962, La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada, 1972—and also to a Spanish collection, Todos los Cuentos de Gabriel García Márquez, 1975. The three books do represent different moments in García Márquez's writing career—although the end of each volume tends to prepare the scene for the next. Thus the “Monologue of Isabel Watching the Rain …” introduces us to the Macondo which figures in several stories of Los Funerales …, including the title one. That story in turn presents the realm of hyperbole and magic which predominates in the next volume. Very roughly, the development is from a form of Gothic or Surrealist nightmare into a laconic, cinematic evocation of a historical place; and from there into a rewriting of that same place as a bitter and difficult fairyland. The progression of the novels is quite different: from historical fiction into historical myth and from there into a historicized and haunting echo of soap opera.

There is not a whole lot of counsel to be found in the early stories. They are tentative and experimental, good on atmosphere, weak in their attempts at the calm but crowded epigrams which punctuate García Márquez's best-known work. People say things like “I'll never smile again”, and you can almost hear the clatter of the failed resonance. There are moments when counsel seems to hover in a phrase or a joke. “The greatest terror of his life” is a commonplace, but “The greatest terror of his life and of his death” is more complicated, unsettling boundaries that seemed stable. Three men whose eyes have been picked out by curlews—the birds were insulted, apparently, by one of the men's imitation of their cry—are accused of believing too readily what they read in the papers. What they are supposed to have read is the story of their own blinding.

The method of the second set of stories owes a lot to Hemingway and the Italian cinema, since they seek to evoke a violent and oppressive tropic through a sparing display of image and incident. The climate is essential here: rain-sodden when it is not dust-laden, unbearably hot, in one story hotter than it has ever been. A mother and daughter arrive to visit the grave of a thief shot a week ago: their son and brother. A dentist extracts, without anaesthetic, the aching tooth of a political enemy. An artisan gives away a beautiful bird-cage he was hoping to be handsomely paid for, and discovers that the difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich can't afford to get angry or they'll die of apoplexy. In the next story, a rich man gets angry and dies. We get our counsel exactly as Benjamin says, by continuing the story in our minds, by taking it further than it goes on the page. Here the epigrams begin to work very powerfully. The dentist extracting his enemy's tooth says “This is where you pay for twenty dead men, lieutenant.” It's a poor vengeance, not a payment at all, but the lieutenant's toothache is something to be grateful for, a faint gesture towards the redistribution of pain.

García Márquez is often thought of as writing fantasy, or some sort of mix of fantasy and realism, but in his novels the fantastic occurs only on the level of our perception of the reported events. No one in the novels thinks what is happening is fantastic, and neither does the narrator. The tone is serenely unastonished, even when astonishment would seem natural, almost obligatory. In the later stories, the frankly fantastic occurs all the time, and is experienced as such: an ageing angel in the backyard, a phantom ocean liner, a drowned giant. The narrative voice is often that of a protagonist, and mimes oral effects far more closely than usually occurs in the novels. “Madre mía”, it says, “ladies and gentlemen”, “now they're going to see who I am”. The most spectacular instance of this style is the story “Big Mama's Funeral”, which takes the form of a gossipy report offered as a desirable, truthful alternative to what “historians” will tell us. Not only is this funeral “the greatest funeral in the world”, the end of a seemingly endless era in the corrupt and credulous realm of Macondo, but Big Mama becomes an emblem of that (all-too-historical) form of political power which rules through fantasy, which is fantasy turned into tyranny. It takes her three hours to enumerate her material possessions, but her “immaterial possessions”, her bienes morales, are even more impressive:

The wealth of the subsoil, the territorial waters, the colours of the flag, national sovereignty, the traditional parties, the rights of man, civil liberties, the first magistrate, the second instance, the third debate, letters of recommendation, historical records, free elections, beauty queens, transcendental speeches, huge demonstrations, distinguished young ladies, proper gentlemen, punctilious military men. His Illustrious Eminence, the Supreme Court, goods whose importation was forbidden, liberal ladies, the meat problem, the purity of the language, setting a good example, law and order, the free but responsible press, the Athens of South America, public opinion, the lessons of democracy, Christian morality, the shortage of foreign exchange, the right of asylum, the Communist menace, the ship of state, the high cost of living, Republican traditions, the disadvantaged classes, statements of political support.

Big Mama owns almost everything that keeps us in our place, and there is a similar joke in a later story, where Blacamán the magician is said to have been so good at embalming viceroys that “for many years they went on governing better than when they were alive”. Counsel is not in the list but in what we know about the phrases on the list, the way they are waved about and used: an appeal to the shared experience we may have thought we had lost. Those dead viceroys, like the live ones, govern with our collusion, and not only in Latin America. Reminders of such facts do seem to have an old-fashioned ring; but they are also, given recent events in Eastern Europe and Russia, absolutely up to the minute.